Speak No Evil is an Entertaining, Unnecessary Horror Remake
Christian Tafdrup's chilling 2022 horror hit gets the American thriller treatment — for better and worse.
In David Fincher's underrated Scandinavian noir, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Daniel Craig's journalist is lured into the basement of a serial killer and knocked unconscious. When he awakes, he finds his captor sitting patiently across from him. "Why don't people trust their instincts?" the killer muses. "It's hard to believe that fear of offending can be stronger than the fear of pain, but you know what? It is." It's a chilling observation, and it's at the core of writer-director Christian Tafdrup's unforgettable Danish horror film, Speak No Evil.
The thriller, which left all who watched it in 2022 scarred, explores what can happen when our fear of being perceived as impolite can endanger not only ourselves, but the ones we love. At what point do societal standards become lethal? The original Speak No Evil asks that question, and then it follows it all the way to its inevitable, pitch-black conclusion.
Writer-director James Watkins' new remake centers itself around the same idea, but doesn't go as far with it. Instead, the Eden Lake filmmaker has teamed up with a cast of recognizable stars in an attempt to bring Speak No Evil to a mainstream audience just two years after its parent film was released. His new Speak No Evil is a more straightforward thriller that wraps its fingers around your throat tighter than its parent film and yet leaves far less lasting marks.
A largely rural thriller that'll make you think twice about ever making friends on vacation again, Speak No Evil follows Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise Dalton (Station Eleven star Mackenzie Davis), an American couple living in London with their daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler). While on holiday in Italy, the family crosses paths with another couple, Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their mute son, Ant (Dan Hough). Paddy and Ciara swiftly win over Ben and Louise, and it isn't long before the latter couple has accepted their invite to stay with them at their remote countryside farm for an extended weekend. Once they arrive at their new friends' home, though, Ben and Louise quickly grow uncomfortable with Paddy and Ciara's disregard for what should be obvious social boundaries.
And so Speak No Evil follows dutifully in the footsteps of its predecessor for most of its 110-minute runtime. The film's first two-thirds are comprised of social missteps and microaggressions that range from awkward to menacing, and nearly all of these scenes are lifted straight out of Tafdrup's original. As was the case with that film, too, they all lead to an outcome that most viewers will likely see coming right from the outset. Whereas Tafdrup's Speak No Evil mines most of its initial tension and dread out of its quiet, intimate style, however, Watkins' remake is louder and more immediately grating and aggressive. That difference is made explicitly clear early in Speak No Evil when McAvoy's Paddy asks McNairy's Ben if his family can use the unoccupied pool lounger that Ben is resting his daughter's book and stuffed bunny rabbit on.
This scene is in both versions of Speak No Evil, but while the original simply cuts when Fedja van Huêt's Patrick lifts the lounger out of frame, Watkins' camera watches as McAvoy loudly drags it to the other side of the pool. One approach is not necessarily superior to the other. In fact, the latter suits not only the new film's brighter aesthetic and more jolting style, but also the heightened pitch of McAvoy's central antagonistic performance. As Paddy, the Split actor is a broad-shouldered bundle of over-the-top machismo whose seeming obliviousness about his tendency to physically impose himself on others is betrayed by how frequently his friendly smiles seem to twitch into ominous glares. McAvoy’s turn isn't, by any means, a subtle performance, but it's the one that Watkins' Speak No Evil demands.
Speak No Evil goes bigger and bloodier than its predecessor, but it doesn’t pack nearly as hearty of a punch to the gut.
It's McAvoy's off-kilter intensity that energizes Speak No Evil's first 90 or so minutes, along with Watkins' ability to find even more room for instances of black comic humor throughout the film than Tafdrup did. It's in its final third, however, that Watkins' Speak No Evil creates the most distance between itself and its parent movie.
Its commitment to its own, unyielding cynicism makes the latter feels greatly indebted to European horror classics like The Vanishing and Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Tafdrup's film is an exercise in gradual violence that reveals just how deeply conditioned we all are to let the worst happen to us out of fear of upsetting the social status quo. Watching it for the first time feels like looking into the eyes of an expressionless, uncaring face. Watkins' Speak No Evil, conversely, carries itself with a maniacal kind of masochistic glee. Its influences feel closer to violent American thrillers like Straw Dogs than Funny Games.
Does that make the remake ineffective? Not at all. As he demonstrated in 2008's Eden Lake, Watkins has a knack for messy human-on-human violence, and that is on full display in Speak No Evil's rip-roaring second half. This time around, though, Watkins has seemingly prioritized popcorn-minded satisfaction over anything else. In doing so, he has not only lost the thematic resonance of the original Speak No Evil, but also the one thing that truly separated it from every other thrillers like it. The result is a crowd-pleasing remake that packs less hearty of a punch to the gut than its predecessor, even as it indulges in more blockbuster brutality than Tafdrup's.
Mackenzie Davis helps emotionally anchor Speak No Evil with her wide-eyed, observant turn as a mom and wife who has a harder and harder time ignoring her instincts.
In many ways, the new Speak No Evil isn't all that unlike a lot of the American remakes of other, successful international films that have come before it. That is to say that it does a lot of what its parent film did in a flashier way, but it stops short of going where that movie ultimately goes. The remake is well-crafted and, above all else, more palatable and entertaining than its 2022 predecessor. That makes it an undeniably more appealing way to spend a Friday or Saturday night at the movie theater. Most viewers will probably leave it thrilled and satisfied — even if those familiar with the original Speak No Evil know that "palatable" and "entertaining" are two things it was never meant to be.
